The Art of Fielding: A Novel [Kindle Edition]

Chad Harbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2011

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Though The Art of Fielding is his fiction debut, Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist. He exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative, and in some 500 pages, there's rarely a word that feels out of place. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach's concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships--between friends, family, and lovers--and the unpredictable forces that complicate them. There's an unintended affair, a post-graduate plan derailed by rejection letters, a marriage dissolved by honesty, and at the center of the book, the single baseball error that sets all of these events into motion. The Art of Fielding is somehow both confident and intimate, simple yet deeply moving. Harbach has penned one of the year's finest works of fiction. --Kevin Nguyen

Review

‘Reading The Art of Fielding is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop: you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors. First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom.’ Jonathan Franzen“Chad Harbach has hit a game-ender with The Art of Fielding. It’s pure fun, easy to read, as if the other Fielding had a hand in it — as if Tom Jones were about baseball and college life.” – John Irving“The Novel of the Month Season Year…. Riveting…[The Art of Fielding] emerges fully formed, a world unto itself. Harbach writes with a tender, egoless virtuosity…There’s just something so easy and riveting about the way this book’s layers unfold; not since Lonesome Dove have I been so sorry to let a group of characters go.” –Andres Corsello, GQ“[The Art of Fielding] is not only a wonderful baseball novel—it zooms immediately into the pantheon of classics, alongside The Natural by Bernard Malamud and The Southpaw by Mark Harris—but it’s also a magical, melancholy story about friendship and the coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer…Mr. Harbach has the rare abilities to write with earnest, deeply felt emotion without ever veering into sentimentality, and to create quirky, vulnerable and fully imagined characters who instantly take up residence in our hearts and minds… He has written a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting….You don’t need to be a baseball fan to fall under this novel’s spell, but THE ART OF FIELDING possesses all the pleasures that an aficionado cherishes in a great, classic game: odd and strangely satisfying symmetries, unforeseen swerves of fortune, and intimations of the delicate balance between individual will and destiny that play out on the field.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel…. It seems a stretch for a baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and the entire...

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Product Details

• File Size: 808 KB
• Print Length: 535 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0316126691
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (September 7, 2011)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004QZ9PE2
• Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #211 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #2 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Sports
  • #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Sports
  • #4 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Psychological Thrillers

More About the Author

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin and was educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He is a cofounder and coeditor of n+1.